Hume AI

Alan Cowen holds a PhD in Psychology from UC Berkeley, where he developed computational methods to parameterize human emotional expressions — discovering that traditional classification systems miss over 70% of the emotional information present in voice and facial data. He advocated for emotional intelligence in AI at both Google and Facebook before founding Hume AI in 2021 to build AI that can perceive and respond to human emotion. His work spans neural representations of emotion via brain imaging, analysis of facial expressions in ancient sculptures, and deep-learning models applied to millions of naturalistic videos. In January 2026 he joined Google DeepMind.